perfidy

"NYC doorman suspended for bad breath"

This happened to one of my friends. You have to read it in her words, though, to really get the full gist of it.

Part the First
Part the Second
Part the Third

From the afternoon inbox, I thought I'd share:

HOW THE FIGHT STARTED

I rear-ended a car this morning. So there we are alongside the road and slowly the driver gets out of the car . . .and you know how you just get sooo stressed out and life-stuff seems to get funny?

Yeah, well, I could NOT believe it. . . he was a DWARF! He storms over to my car, looks up at me and says, 'I AM NOT HAPPY!'

So, I look down at him and say, 'Well, which one are you then?'. . . and that's when the fight started . . .

Talking to my mom the other day, we wondered if any city has suffered longer than Cleveland. It has been more than forty years since Cleveland has won a sports championship of any flavor. Boston fans have until recently been the greatest of whiners, bemoaning endlessly the decades that had lapsed since the Red Sox won a World Series. Waaagh, the curse of the Bambino, waagh, Bucky Fucking Dent, waaagh.

Of course, in the meantime, they’ve had several recent Patriots Super Bowl wins, and the Celtics once won eight NBA titles in a row, and that was in the middle of a 11 of 13 stretch. And even more of course, that’s completely aside of the fact that the Chicago Cubs had gone a full decade longer without a World Series win, and in fact never will win the World Series again.

A little research turned up a startling fact. There are 21 cities with at least three major league teams out of a possible four. (Only New York City has two of each, though once Los Angeles did. Cleveland had, for several years in the seventies, a “grand slam” – one team in each of the majors.) Of these, all but three have won at least one championship since 1990, and most have won one in the current decade. The three sad cities are Philadelphia, Seattle and Cleveland. The ‘76ers won in 1983, and the Super Sonics last won a championship in ’79. And Cleveland has been winless since the two days after Christmas, 1964 when the Browns beat the Baltimore Colts 27-0.

We’ve been suffering fifteen years longer.

But hey, surely there are other sufferers out there! Well, let’s be generous and roll in cities with only two major league teams. It gets only slightly tougher to complain. There are ten more cities with two major league franchises. Of these, Charlotte, Nashville and New Orleans have had no championships, ever. But – but! - in each of these cities, major league sports came to the city after Cleveland’s last championship: New Orleans just after, and Charlotte and Nashville within the last decade or so.

So they haven’t suffered longer.

Only one city has actually gone longer without a championship. San Diego, whose Chargers won an AFL League championship in ’63, one year before the Browns’ last NFL Championship. The Bills just miss, and squeak by with a ’65 AFL win. However if you, like my mom, consider the AFL to have been a minor league up until the beginning of the merger with the NFL – the first Super Bowl (technically, the first AFL-NFL World Championship Game that was later renamed Super Bowl I) in 1967 – then Cleveland is still the city with the most suffering.

ESPN agrees – a couple years back they voted Cleveland the most tortured sports city.

And I know from personal experience that this is true.

Okay, getting to the top stop took some help.

Like from Pittsburgh and Oklahoma most recently, but also Kansas and Arkansas, and in fact every unranked team that beat a top-five ranked team this year (all what? fifteen now?) starting with Appalachian State's crushing Michigan. (Excepting of course, Illinois.)

Go Bucks!

I know you're all as shocked as I am to learn that Evel Knievel has died.

See, I figure he actually died a long, long time ago. It's just taken him this long to stop moving.

Ian

Earlier this week, I came down with my annual November Pox, which means that I'm all cranky and snotty and spending a great deal of time curled up on the couch with two or more four-legged critters on top of me. This morning, desperate to not watch Maury or The View, I found an old episode of Walker: Texas Ranger and figured, what the hell, it might be good for giggles.

I was so right. And I have to share this with you.

So, Walker and his buddy are out on horseback on the Indian reservation ... y'know, like you do ... and they're suddenly confronted by a pack of angry white guys in pickup trucks. One of the bad guys asks Walker if he's a ranger. Walker nods affirmatively, and bad guy responds:

"Why don't y'all just sashay your ranger butts back to Texas? We got us an Injun to catch."

He actually said it like that. "Injun."

And then Chuck Norris roundhouse-kicked all of them in the face.

Most awesome thing I've seen all week.

[wik] I'm pretty sure this was the one and only time in the history of the English language that the words "sashay" and "Injun" have been used within one sentence of each other.

Here we see the secret heart of environmentalism.

it's kinda tricky to litter when you're going 1600mph.

I went to visit Johno and the lovely and talented Misses Johno.

I was by myself, and had a rental car because I didn't want to take my warwagon so far. Because, in my dream, they lived in Texas, I think...maybe Arizona. Someplace scrubby.

So I got down there, and they had a sweet place. It was a big second-floor apartment. It was new, but had alot of interesting spaces and unexpected nooks characteristic of older, re-purposed accomodations. The net effect was very positive. Johno even had the space to have his whole baking set-up the way he (mostly) wanted.

I guess we hung out through the night...I dunno, or maybe I just got down there really early in the morning. I got a hankerin' for a McDonald's breakfast sandwich, which is odd for several reasons, and I was astonished, even in my dream, that Johno wanted one too. I don't think I ever left to get any though, because I couldn't retain his directions to the nearest one. We ended up playing pool on the huge red felt pool table that dominated his living room that I guess I hadn't noticed before.

But by then Misses Johno was trying to sleep on the little daybed nearby, and kept yelling at us to stop making so much noise. I was trying to puzzle through how to play pool quietly, then realized they didn't have a bedroom at all but slept either on or next to the pool table.